Technorati Tags: credit cards, debit cards, fraud, payments, retail
There’s no urgency around that last 50,000. The UK’s biggest retailer, Tesco, say : “Fraud levels at our self-service checkouts and petrol pumps are very low and no higher than at our main checkouts, which have full chip and PIN.”
There are still millions of places where you can’t use cards, of course, such as the parking machines round the corner from our office, but I’m sure that will change in time. Meanwhile, in the land of the rising phone bill, the idea that you would use anything as old-fashioned as a card to buy something from a machine is already fading now that Coca-Cola have said that it will accept mobile (contactless) payments at all of its 200,000 machines by the end of 2008. The march of Felica (the e-purse developed by Sony that it integrated into NTT DoCoMo phones) continues.
Reading this reminded me of an amusing (and, if I remember my rather poor English Literature Ordinary Level properly, allegorical) conversation I had at a conference a few months ago. I was chatting to a guy in the smart card world. His company had a stand (to do with EMV cards) at an exhibition in Japan. Opposite the stand was a drinks machine. He wanted to stop his Japanese partners from buying drinks from the machine using their mobile phones because he wanted them to use cards, but eventually he gave up…